LAKELAND Life in the 1940s and 1950s: The Photographs of Gwen Bertelsman., edited by Martin Varley. Halsgrove, £24.95. ISBN 1 84114 2778

GWEN Bertelsman is remembered as a lady with a camera and a car. A quiet, shy woman, she moved from London at the end of the 1930s to a small cottage above Rydal Water to be with her friend and mentor Frances Lewis.

Gwen worked as an administrater at the Ethel Hedley Children’s Orthopaedic Hospital, at Calgarth, Windermere, during the 1940s and 1950s, and on her days off she would tour the Lakes in ‘Suzie’ – her Austin 7 motor – and her camera, capturing the honest toil of people going about their everyday life.

There is no prejudice in her pictures, no effort to romanticise the rural scene – these are images perfectly portraying the feel of the Lake District during wartime, when life had an intensity never seen before or since. Gwen’s photographs give a fresh insight into this unique period of Lakeland’s past.

A keen amateur, she occasionally sent her photographs to magazines for publication. However, more often than not, a polite rejection note was all she received.

Frances died in the early 1950s and, with the loss of her friend, Gwen’s zeal for photography went too. She left the Lakes – never to return.

Her battered box of images was donated to the Friends of the Lake District after her death in 1994, and more than 150 of these have now been published. Lakeland Life in the 1940s and 1950s is a testament to Gwen’s photographic talents, and a unique portrait of the area during and after the Second World War.

Ann Clarke